Exactly how do we define mandatory recall here? Are police going to turn up at your door if you don't send it back in?
"Good Times" wasn't a hoax
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 3
The famous "Good Times" virus wasn't a hoax. There really was a virus, transmitted by email, which merely needed to be read by a human to be activated. Of course, most of the details were wrong... it didn't normally have the subject line 'good times', nor did it reformat hard drives. In fact, all that it did was clog up email systems and waste time by propagating itself.
This case isn't going to be solved by structural remedies, because they would be both unnecessary and far too complex. Breaking up Microsoft would be a huge task. Just look at how long it took to deal with AT&T, and realize that Microsoft is far more complicated than AT&T was considering all the interrelated products Microsoft produces, and the fact that Microsoft is far from static. Any breakup would be so complicated and take so long that nobody would really end up happy. But it is also unnecessary. Look at what the problem is. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems, and has leveraged that monopoly to both eliminate competitors and gain dominance in other markets. Those are easy problems to deal with without structural remedies. To deal with the issue of competition in the OS market, first realize that competition is not always a good thing. For example, cable operators tend to have monopolies -- because it is more efficient to have one cable network in any given city than two. The issue of pricing is dealt with by government supervision: In Canada, if a cable operator wants to increase prices, the increases have to be justified to, and approved by, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission. So all the government needs to do here, is establish an 'operating system pricing commission' or suchlike, which tells Microsoft that they cannot charge more than a certain price for their operating systems. The other issue -- Microsoft leveraging its OS monopoly to gain dominance in other markets -- is even simpler to deal with. To stop them gaining market share by bundling products, insist upon a uniform pricing scheme for their operating systems, independant of other products on the same system. And to stop them using their technical knowledge of their own operating system, open the APIs. With those three steps -- government control over pricing, a uniform pricing scheme, and open APIs -- Microsoft becomes unable to leverage its monopoly illegally any more. Oh, and slap a $50B fine on them for their past illegal practices, of course.
... he can demonstrate that the webmaster has acted malliciously or negligently in allowing slander to be posted on his website. It is just like the graffiti-covered wall. If you put up a wall and you tell other people 'please write obscenities here', you are liable. If you put up a wall, people write obscenities, someone complains, and you do not take reasonable steps (ie, removing said graffiti), you are liable. I don't know the details of the case in question, but if the professor complained about obscenity or libelous comments and said comments were not removed, he does have a case.
To use other Internet service providers, a student has to purchase a digital-to-analog phone converter and can only use the connection after business hours. What's the odds that the reported who wrote this knows that a "digital-to-analog phone converter" is also called a modem?
Net companies are losing money. So what else is new? The article claims that Amazon is going to run out of money in 21 months. IFF they don't raise more capital before then. Has amazon *ever* been more than 21 months away from bankruptcy? This is the company which used the 'net 60 days' payment scheme to provide almost all of its working capital for a significant part of its lifetime. I'm certain that it was closer than 21 months away from insolvancy back then. Yes, if all the funding dried up immediately those companies might be in trouble. But the funding isn't going to suddenly dry up, and even if it did, those companies would easily have enough time to change their business practices (ie, raise prices) so that they could stay afloat.
Why do patents get examined at all? As I understood it, the idea of patents being examined by the patent office was to determine if they could be valid -- in other words, to determine if there was prior art, and if the invention was sufficiently 'novel'. Why do this at all? Wouldn't it be perfectly good enough to simply have a 'registry of neat ideas', where people could, for some tiny fee, register a neat idea they had, after which point anyone wanting to use the idea would either have to negotiate with the inventor OR show prior art OR show that the invention is not 'novel'? It seems to me that this is effectively what happens already -- the patent office seems to issue patents on basically anything, and the validity of the patents is only going to be sorted out in the courts anyway.
I for one would like to applaud the priorities set and decisions made by NASA. The scientists at NASA have consistantly demonstrated that their commitment is to science, and not to publicity or electioneering. The space program put people on the moon in the 60s. Today, NASA has satellites in orbit which are providing us with fascinating insight into the nature of the universe. Sure, if everyone really wanted to, NASA probably could send people to mars in the next few decades... but if they did so, they would have that much less money to spend on real science. I for one consider the Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory to be far greater achievements than placing a few people on the moon was, or placing a few people on mars would be.
You missed my point. RISC processors in theory run on at least as high frequencies as their CISC counterparts, if not significantly higher. Instead we have Intel releasing 1.3GHz Willamettes in Q3 00, and IBM releasing 1.1GHz Power4s in Q3 01, almost a year later. Sure the memory bandwidth, dual processors, increased cache, and massive superscalarity will make the Power4 faster anyway... but it used to be that RISC systems had better CPI *and* higher clockspeeds.
There was a serious discussion on usenet recently about whether it was possible to replace the oscillator on a network card, to get it to run at 200mbps instead of 100mbps. The discussion was cut short when it was pointed out that you would have to change all the network cards connected to the same network for it to work. As far as I know, nobody has tried this yet.
When I initially read this, I thought to myself, "Why didn't IBM just do a machine that was super-superscalar?"
Because of limited instruction level parallelism. Even with a 512 entry reorder window, 256 renaming registers, and a 256-way superscalar architecture, you still won't have ILP beyond about 10 on the gcc component of the spec benchmarks. Furthermore, as you increase the width of a machine, you increase the difficulty of finding all the data dependancies quadratically, since each instruction must be compared with each other instruction. Ultimately it comes down to an issue of decreasing returns, and you find that it is cheaper and faster to run two threads at once than it is to allocated twice as many resources to a single thread.
As for the question of caching, I'd assume that they share the L2 cache the same way as in any other such system -- they share the bus, write to and read from the same cache, and snoop each other's actions. They of course would have their own internal L1 caches, with lower latency.
I'm not impressed. Sure Intel and AMD have had trouble even getting up to 1GHz, but the power4 should be compared to the upcoming Willamette cpus, which are going to be starting at 1.3GHz -- and that is in the middle of *this* year, not the second half of next year when the power4 will be shipping. Sure it will be cool to have two processors within a single die, sure it will be cool to have a 500MHz bus... but the article makes it sound like the clock speed will be something really great, while in fact it is a little disappointing.
IANA physicist, but I think I remember reading about that experiment, and its subsequent explanation. If my memory serves, what was demonstrated was that when the particular particles used in the experiment tunneled through a barrier, the front part of the wave got through the barrier, while the back part did not (quantum physics particle=wave stuff). So measuring the 'average' time resulted in finding that the particles were travelling faster than light. This is like shutting down a major highway at 4:45, and then saying "look, the average person who got home from work that evening got home earlier than the average person when the highway was still open", ignoring the people who didn't get home at all.
If you think about it for a moment, this is just like the/. polls. On the polls, (especially when it is US related) the one loony answer always wins, because whenever people don't have a clue what the other answers mean, they pick the loony answer. The process of choosing questions by moderation is exactly the same, except that it is a poll of moderators instead of everyone. Which is a bit depressing... it means that there are lots of moderators who don't understand the other questions.
Damn! 50 for an Alpha!! Some of us would be taking home supercomputers! Yeah, so maybe those numbers are a little off. But still, I'd prefer to read Sig 11's posts over Hemos' or CmdrTaco's any day. It doesn't exactly seem fair that Hemos and CmdrTaco get paid so much (how many millions in stock right now?) while the people who write the funny, informative, interesting, insightful (etc.) posts don't get anything.
Andover needs to encourage Slashdot readership by giving away free computers and Internet access to all registered non-anonymous users I've got a better idea. Give people computers based on their karma -- if your karma is negative, you get nothing, if it is up to 10, you get a MIPS processor, between 10 and 50 you get an Intel processor, and above 50 you get an Alpha. After all, doesn't it makes sense for a publisher (Andover) to pay people who write their content (the people who post stuff interesting enough to get moderated up)?
Come on, this story is clearly "score -1: misleading". We need to get story moderation going so that people can filter out stories like this. Either that, or have the/. editors pay a little bit more attention to what they are posting.
What sort of fabrication process are they using? The specs say that it will run off of 2.2V, but they are using a 0.18um process to make it -- are they trying to melt their chips? Intel's.25um process originally designed to run with 1.8V, and their.18um chips are running on 1.6V and 1.65V -- why is this cyrix chips running with such a high voltage?
I have had this problem with 4.08, and it looks to me like it is the result of having orphaned threads lying around. (this in under both 95 and 2000). Sometimes when I exit netscape, it doesn't close down all its threads, and I can still see the process "running" even though all its threads are frozen. When I open up netscape again it creates a new window under the old process, but then can't load pages because all its page-loading threads are stalled. Until I noticed the zombie netscape running I always rebooted to solve this problem, but now it seems fine if I just kill the process from task manager. I don't know if this is the same problem, but try looking for zombie threads.
As the slashdot management has said many times,/. is news for geeks, not news for linux users. Believe it or not, there are geeks who use windows (like most of the ones with jobs). If all you want to read about is linux, well, there are other news sites around. If you come to/. you should expect to read about more than just linux, because, *there is more to the world than linux*.
Define "still". In my frame of reference, yes, the quasar is still there. If you mean 13 billion years from now, well, that black hole should survive O(10^70) years IIRC, so probably yes.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly how do we define mandatory recall here? Are police going to turn up at your door if you don't send it back in?
The famous "Good Times" virus wasn't a hoax. There really was a virus, transmitted by email, which merely needed to be read by a human to be activated.
Of course, most of the details were wrong... it didn't normally have the subject line 'good times', nor did it reformat hard drives. In fact, all that it did was clog up email systems and waste time by propagating itself.
This case isn't going to be solved by structural remedies, because they would be both unnecessary and far too complex.
Breaking up Microsoft would be a huge task. Just look at how long it took to deal with AT&T, and realize that Microsoft is far more complicated than AT&T was considering all the interrelated products Microsoft produces, and the fact that Microsoft is far from static. Any breakup would be so complicated and take so long that nobody would really end up happy.
But it is also unnecessary. Look at what the problem is. Microsoft has a monopoly on operating systems, and has leveraged that monopoly to both eliminate competitors and gain dominance in other markets. Those are easy problems to deal with without structural remedies.
To deal with the issue of competition in the OS market, first realize that competition is not always a good thing. For example, cable operators tend to have monopolies -- because it is more efficient to have one cable network in any given city than two. The issue of pricing is dealt with by government supervision: In Canada, if a cable operator wants to increase prices, the increases have to be justified to, and approved by, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission. So all the government needs to do here, is establish an 'operating system pricing commission' or suchlike, which tells Microsoft that they cannot charge more than a certain price for their operating systems.
The other issue -- Microsoft leveraging its OS monopoly to gain dominance in other markets -- is even simpler to deal with. To stop them gaining market share by bundling products, insist upon a uniform pricing scheme for their operating systems, independant of other products on the same system. And to stop them using their technical knowledge of their own operating system, open the APIs.
With those three steps -- government control over pricing, a uniform pricing scheme, and open APIs -- Microsoft becomes unable to leverage its monopoly illegally any more.
Oh, and slap a $50B fine on them for their past illegal practices, of course.
... he can demonstrate that the webmaster has acted malliciously or negligently in allowing slander to be posted on his website.
It is just like the graffiti-covered wall. If you put up a wall and you tell other people 'please write obscenities here', you are liable. If you put up a wall, people write obscenities, someone complains, and you do not take reasonable steps (ie, removing said graffiti), you are liable.
I don't know the details of the case in question, but if the professor complained about obscenity or libelous comments and said comments were not removed, he does have a case.
To use other Internet service providers, a student has to purchase a digital-to-analog phone converter and can only use the connection after business hours.
What's the odds that the reported who wrote this knows that a "digital-to-analog phone converter" is also called a modem?
Net companies are losing money. So what else is new?
The article claims that Amazon is going to run out of money in 21 months. IFF they don't raise more capital before then. Has amazon *ever* been more than 21 months away from bankruptcy? This is the company which used the 'net 60 days' payment scheme to provide almost all of its working capital for a significant part of its lifetime. I'm certain that it was closer than 21 months away from insolvancy back then.
Yes, if all the funding dried up immediately those companies might be in trouble. But the funding isn't going to suddenly dry up, and even if it did, those companies would easily have enough time to change their business practices (ie, raise prices) so that they could stay afloat.
This number is the proof -- Goldbach was wrong! VISA Card: 3472569876-97846957824-356346-53747-5666-66
5 698769784695782435634653747566247 5 698769784695782435634653747566013 2 5698769784695782435634653747565479 2 5698769784695782435634653747565047 2 5698769784695782435634653747564759 2 5698769784695782435634653747564663 2 5698769784695782435634653747563979 2 5698769784695782435634653747563127 2 5698769784695782435634653747562527 2 5698769784695782435634653747562119 2 5698769784695782435634653747561519 2 5698769784695782435634653747560637 2 5698769784695782435634653747560619 2 5698769784695782435634653747559803 2 5698769784695782435634653747559623 2 5698769784695782435634653747558759 2 5698769784695782435634653747558393 2 5698769784695782435634653747558069 2 5698769784695782435634653747557247 7 25698769784695782435634653747556599 7 25698769784695782435634653747555693 7 25698769784695782435634653747555177 7 25698769784695782435634653747555009 7 25698769784695782435634653747554319 7 25698769784695782435634653747553479 7 25698769784695782435634653747552867 7 25698769784695782435634653747552219 7 25698769784695782435634653747552177 7 25698769784695782435634653747552039 7 25698769784695782435634653747551529 7 25698769784695782435634653747551397 7 25698769784695782435634653747551223 7 25698769784695782435634653747550857 7 25698769784695782435634653747550437 7 25698769784695782435634653747550173 7 25698769784695782435634653747549879 7 25698769784695782435634653747549729 7 25698769784695782435634653747548163
Sorry, but you missed a few primes. My calculator gives the following as the first few examples:
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=419+3472
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=653+3472
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=1187+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=1619+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=1907+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=2003+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=2687+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=3539+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=4139+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=4547+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=5147+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=6029+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=6047+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=6863+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=7043+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=7907+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=8273+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=8597+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=9419+347
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=10067+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=10973+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=11489+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=11657+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=12347+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=13187+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=13799+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=14447+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=14489+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=14627+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=15137+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=15269+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=15443+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=15809+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=16229+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=16493+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=16787+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=16937+34
34725698769784695782435634653747566666=18503+34
Why do patents get examined at all?
As I understood it, the idea of patents being examined by the patent office was to determine if they could be valid -- in other words, to determine if there was prior art, and if the invention was sufficiently 'novel'.
Why do this at all?
Wouldn't it be perfectly good enough to simply have a 'registry of neat ideas', where people could, for some tiny fee, register a neat idea they had, after which point anyone wanting to use the idea would either have to negotiate with the inventor OR show prior art OR show that the invention is not 'novel'?
It seems to me that this is effectively what happens already -- the patent office seems to issue patents on basically anything, and the validity of the patents is only going to be sorted out in the courts anyway.
I for one would like to applaud the priorities set and decisions made by NASA. The scientists at NASA have consistantly demonstrated that their commitment is to science, and not to publicity or electioneering.
The space program put people on the moon in the 60s. Today, NASA has satellites in orbit which are providing us with fascinating insight into the nature of the universe.
Sure, if everyone really wanted to, NASA probably could send people to mars in the next few decades... but if they did so, they would have that much less money to spend on real science.
I for one consider the Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory to be far greater achievements than placing a few people on the moon was, or placing a few people on mars would be.
Man, what I really want to overclock is the battery in my laptop. =)
;-)
You want to make the battery run faster? How odd. I'd prefer it to run slower, and thus last correspondingly longer.
who in the hell needs that kind of power?
/. of course.
Anyone who runs a website which gets mentioned on
You missed my point. RISC processors in theory run on at least as high frequencies as their CISC counterparts, if not significantly higher. Instead we have Intel releasing 1.3GHz Willamettes in Q3 00, and IBM releasing 1.1GHz Power4s in Q3 01, almost a year later. Sure the memory bandwidth, dual processors, increased cache, and massive superscalarity will make the Power4 faster anyway... but it used to be that RISC systems had better CPI *and* higher clockspeeds.
There was a serious discussion on usenet recently about whether it was possible to replace the oscillator on a network card, to get it to run at 200mbps instead of 100mbps.
The discussion was cut short when it was pointed out that you would have to change all the network cards connected to the same network for it to work.
As far as I know, nobody has tried this yet.
When I initially read this, I thought to myself, "Why didn't IBM just do a machine that was super-superscalar?"
Because of limited instruction level parallelism. Even with a 512 entry reorder window, 256 renaming registers, and a 256-way superscalar architecture, you still won't have ILP beyond about 10 on the gcc component of the spec benchmarks. Furthermore, as you increase the width of a machine, you increase the difficulty of finding all the data dependancies quadratically, since each instruction must be compared with each other instruction. Ultimately it comes down to an issue of decreasing returns, and you find that it is cheaper and faster to run two threads at once than it is to allocated twice as many resources to a single thread.
As for the question of caching, I'd assume that they share the L2 cache the same way as in any other such system -- they share the bus, write to and read from the same cache, and snoop each other's actions. They of course would have their own internal L1 caches, with lower latency.
I'm not impressed. Sure Intel and AMD have had trouble even getting up to 1GHz, but the power4 should be compared to the upcoming Willamette cpus, which are going to be starting at 1.3GHz -- and that is in the middle of *this* year, not the second half of next year when the power4 will be shipping.
Sure it will be cool to have two processors within a single die, sure it will be cool to have a 500MHz bus... but the article makes it sound like the clock speed will be something really great, while in fact it is a little disappointing.
IANA physicist, but I think I remember reading about that experiment, and its subsequent explanation.
If my memory serves, what was demonstrated was that when the particular particles used in the experiment tunneled through a barrier, the front part of the wave got through the barrier, while the back part did not (quantum physics particle=wave stuff). So measuring the 'average' time resulted in finding that the particles were travelling faster than light.
This is like shutting down a major highway at 4:45, and then saying "look, the average person who got home from work that evening got home earlier than the average person when the highway was still open", ignoring the people who didn't get home at all.
If you think about it for a moment, this is just like the /. polls.
On the polls, (especially when it is US related) the one loony answer always wins, because whenever people don't have a clue what the other answers mean, they pick the loony answer. The process of choosing questions by moderation is exactly the same, except that it is a poll of moderators instead of everyone.
Which is a bit depressing... it means that there are lots of moderators who don't understand the other questions.
Damn! 50 for an Alpha!! Some of us would be taking home supercomputers!
Yeah, so maybe those numbers are a little off. But still, I'd prefer to read Sig 11's posts over Hemos' or CmdrTaco's any day. It doesn't exactly seem fair that Hemos and CmdrTaco get paid so much (how many millions in stock right now?) while the people who write the funny, informative, interesting, insightful (etc.) posts don't get anything.
Andover needs to encourage Slashdot readership by giving away free computers and Internet access to all registered non-anonymous users
I've got a better idea. Give people computers based on their karma -- if your karma is negative, you get nothing, if it is up to 10, you get a MIPS processor, between 10 and 50 you get an Intel processor, and above 50 you get an Alpha.
After all, doesn't it makes sense for a publisher (Andover) to pay people who write their content (the people who post stuff interesting enough to get moderated up)?
Come on, this story is clearly "score -1: misleading". We need to get story moderation going so that people can filter out stories like this. /. editors pay a little bit more attention to what they are posting.
Either that, or have the
What sort of fabrication process are they using? The specs say that it will run off of 2.2V, but they are using a 0.18um process to make it -- are they trying to melt their chips? .25um process originally designed to run with 1.8V, and their .18um chips are running on 1.6V and 1.65V -- why is this cyrix chips running with such a high voltage?
Intel's
I have had this problem with 4.08, and it looks to me like it is the result of having orphaned threads lying around. (this in under both 95 and 2000).
Sometimes when I exit netscape, it doesn't close down all its threads, and I can still see the process "running" even though all its threads are frozen. When I open up netscape again it creates a new window under the old process, but then can't load pages because all its page-loading threads are stalled.
Until I noticed the zombie netscape running I always rebooted to solve this problem, but now it seems fine if I just kill the process from task manager.
I don't know if this is the same problem, but try looking for zombie threads.
As the slashdot management has said many times, /. is news for geeks, not news for linux users. Believe it or not, there are geeks who use windows (like most of the ones with jobs). /. you should expect to read about more than just linux, because, *there is more to the world than linux*.
If all you want to read about is linux, well, there are other news sites around. If you come to
Define "still". In my frame of reference, yes, the quasar is still there.
If you mean 13 billion years from now, well, that black hole should survive O(10^70) years IIRC, so probably yes.
It is not often that we get such self-descriptive domain names. Cybersquatting.com just redirects people to domain4lease.com.